Talisman

This link now connects to an original copy of the Talisman Spec
(Pardon my notes doodled in the margins)

I want to begin this story with THE END, because if you think about these events in the present context you may realize that it had a bizarrely happy ending for everyone involved.  I would generally characterize my temperament as brutally pragmatic and skeptical.  I have very little patience for self-deluded or apparently irrational people, trying to converse with them is as rewarding as trying to teach my cat calculus.  Judging people harshly has seldom resulted in a disappointing or surprising outcome for me.  I have also always had contempt for what I call the wage-slave mentality, which is people in ordinary jobs who value the security of their paychecks more highly than taking pride in the quality and success of the products they are making.  It is in this context that I will say that people I regarded as my greatest opposition and threat to the confidence I had developed for Microsoft with the game developer and IHV (Independent Hardware Vendor) community did something I never would have expected that forever humbled my capacity for righteous self-assurance.

They won the war and then surrendered to doing the right thing by the IHV’s and developers despite being free to pursue a highly misguided strategy (THEY OWNED) with the full support and sanction of Bill Gates and Nathan Mhyrvold.  This then is the story of Talisman, the first war I ever lost that I was glad about because it was one of the rare events I have witnessed in my career in which “wage-slaves” did the right thing in spite of their own obvious interests.  With that stated I will recount the story I as I saw it then with the caveat that upon reflection over many years I have come to regard my perspective at the time as misguided…

Roll back the clock to late 1995 post Windows 95 release and you would find Microsoft in an uncharacteristic state of turmoil.  For many years the entire company had been tightly focused on shipping a major Windows OS overhaul designed to make Microsoft a successful consumer platform as well as an enterprise one.  Bill Gates was all about getting Microsoft into the living room back then.  He wanted to beat Apple; he wanted to own the set top box, he wanted Windows in every home.  The release and success of Windows 95 was like a dam bursting in many ways.  I remember vividly the day that Windows 95 went gold I was sitting in my office in Building 4 which overlooked the fountain in the central courtyard of the early Microsoft campus.  Hundreds of jubilant engineers poured out of their offices into the courtyard and leaped into the fountain.  David Cole the Program lead for Windows 95 tore a smoking trail through the carpet of the building 5 lobby on his motorcycle.  When the cheer went up, I joined the throng in the fountain where I was nearly drowned by splashing engineers as I got caught up in the crush and pushed down under the water.  A fellow Evangelist, Scott Henson, managed to pull me out.  (Thanks Scott)

After years of grueling hours, burned out millionaire engineers started resigning from Microsoft.  For many others resting-and-vesting was the goal.  The stock had split five times during the Windows 95 development cycle.  Many options were granted to those who had made great contributions to Windows 95.  They were exhausted but it would take 4.5 years before they could exercise the options they had been granted.  Microsoft spawned many new groups during this period that were considered retirement homes for burned out people wanting to vest out their shares in relatively undemanding roles.  MSN was a major destination for these folks.  Like many others at this time I was also exhausted, struggling with a failed marriage and greatly rewarded with stock options for my contributions to Windows 95.  My management told me that only 24 perfect 5.0 reviews had been issued across the company for shipping Windows 95 and Bill Gates had personally signed off on each of them.  I was the recipient of one of those reviews and overnight I was a paper-Microsoft-Millionaire.  Like many of the Evangelists who had worked so hard on Windows 95 I was offered a comfortable “vesting-job” in MSN but because of the unique relationship I had crafted with thousands of developers in the game industry I didn’t feel that I could sail off into the sunset to enjoy the fruits of my labor while leaving them to fend for themselves trying to navigate Microsoft to ensure that their products would continue to work on Windows after I and the team that had made DirectX were no longer responsible for it.

My departing management warned me that I would no longer enjoy the political protection I had under them and that I had made many enemies but I had never gotten over the feeling that getting fired was my destiny.  I had come to measure my own performance by how close I came to termination because clearly nearly being fired was optimal productivity if you defined your job as forcing Microsoft to be accountable to the developers and consumers it should be serving.  My poor managers at the time had given up trying to lecture me about not making waves because I would inevitably respond; “Are you ready to fire me yet, because if you’re not why are we having this conversation?”

In this context a strange malaise fell over Microsoft.  The company seemed to be casting about for focus.  People were leaving or vesting but many also saw the opportunity to build new fiefdoms for themselves. Microsoft was built for aggressive competition, it needed an enemy to martial against and just as Windows 95 was nearing completion, Bill Gates identified Netscape as that new Enemy.

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-internet-memo-2011-7#_methods=onPlusOne%2C_ready%2C_close%2C_open%2C_resizeMe%2C_renderstart%2Concircled&id=I0_1358918011028&parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com

Under Nathan Mhyrvold Microsoft had created what was then called the Advanced Technology Research Group where they had gone about amassing some of the greatest technology luminaries from academia.   The organization cost something like 170M/yr to support and after the release of Windows 95 there was a great deal of pressure to justify (rationalize) this expenditure by trying to productize some of the work from this group.  I had “conflicted” feelings about this organization because on the one hand they had hired graphics industry pioneers like Andy Van dam, Jim Kajiya, Andrew Glassner and others.  These were the guys who taught the first 3D courses I took at Siggraph in the 1980’s and wrote the textbooks I had learned from.  In addition to being very smart, they were likable folks.  On the other hand they had had their own grand scheme for making Windows a consumer OS and dominating the living room.  These were the guys who had been chartered with this task!  It was in some sense a great inconvenience and perhaps an embarrassment for them that DirectX had swept the consumer market in Windows 95, years ahead of their plan to accomplish this task with the Windows NT platform.  Moreover a 3D API that a bunch of evangelists had cooked up was successfully competing with the only 3D API standard previously known, OpenGL.

Now that Windows 95 was shipped and… out of the way… DirectX clearly needed to be owned by the Windows NT team going forward and as such it was relocated into that organization under Deborah Black (See Getting Fired From Microsoft) But now that the crazy media amateurs who had made DirectX were out of the way, it was time for the professionals to take over.  A group responsible for a top secret project from ATG called Talisman would own DirectX going forward.  Talisman was Microsoft’s own 3D chip design.  The plan was for Microsoft to start making its own graphics cards for Windows in direct competition with the dozens of independent hardware IHV’s (Independent Hardware Vendors) who competed in the PC graphics hardware arena.  After that crazy Disney Lion King disaster and all of Alex’s bitching about broken Windows drivers wasn’t it obvious that the best solution was simply to make one graphics card owned by Microsoft?  And hadn’t Microsoft recruited the industries greatest luminaries in the field of graphics? Weren’t all the game developers now screaming for OpenGL support?  Why not give it to them on Microsoft’s own proprietary graphics hardware?  This was Nathan Mhyrvolds vision for the future of Windows media and graphics at the time.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=68335

The Talisman Chicken Video
(It still gives me nightmares)

Of course the highly exotic Talisman architecture in no way conformed to anything that the OpenGL API could support, fortunately, thanks to us,  Microsoft now had its own proprietary low-level driver API in the form of Direct3D.  The Talisman team headed by Jay Torborg would “adapt” DirectX with new API’s to support Talisman hardware!  Furthermore if OpenGL as specified couldn’t support Talisman hardware then OpenGL would have to be “redefined” to an API that could support Talisman.  SGI, a long time competitor of Microsoft in the workstation market, was dying and eager to get a license to the new Windows NT OS.  As part of the deal they had licensed OpenGL to Microsoft.  Now Microsoft formed a “partnership” with SGI to unify their 3D strategies around a new higher-level API called Fahrenheit designed to unify the Direct3D and lower level OpenGL functionality with a high level scene graph API.  As Microsoft had done with Java they would embrace-and-extend the open standard to make it their own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_graphics_API

Softimage Acquisition

To further secure the success of Talisman and Windows NT as a media authoring platform Microsoft had also acquired SoftImage… and if you really want to appreciate the nuisance DirectX created for this strategy recall that no form of DirectX existed in 1994 when this acquisition was completed, it was Windows NT that was scheduled to be a media platform in the future not Windows 95.

The success of DirectX and the release of Windows 95 meant that I had inadvertently delivered a ready-made Microsoft proprietary 3D API and vast community of application developers and graphics IHV’s (Independent Hardware Vendors) to the Windows NT team on schedule for processing into Talisman developers.  My DirectX Allies, Eric Engstrom and Craig Eisler had moved to join the Internet revolution working for John Ludwig on Internet Explorer.  The role of DRG had also been shifted to Internet Explorer.  I had been promoted and given a team to promote rich media support in IE.  (Another story) Worrying about DirectX was no longer my job and my relationship to the platform could have ended there if not for two problems.

1)      I felt responsible to the community of Windows game developers I had created

2)      We had become famous at Microsoft.  It had been much easier to pull-off a skunk works technology coupe with DirectX when nobody was paying attention to us.  Now Eric and Craig had aspirations to create an online media revolution with Internet Explorer but now everything we said and did was closely scrutinized.

I made a secret pact with my two friends.   I was too tired and overwhelmed dealing with my divorce to lead another platform battle.  I promised them that instead I would run interference for them to buy them time to make progress by making life miserable for their “enemies and detractors”.  I would bomb Talisman with everything I had until something “snapped” thereby keeping them busy dealing with me while Craig and Eric made headway with media support in Internet Explorer.  I should note that running suicidal interference had previously been Eric’s job to provide cover for Craig to crank out DirectX but now Eric wanted to join the ranks of respectable management so I volunteered to take his place in the barrel. (*Hence Eric’s reference to our good-cop-bad-cop routine in his email to me in the Evangelism is War blog)

I bombarded Gates and Nathan with messages about the success of DirectX among game developers. The success of DirectX among hardware IHV’s.  How we were addressing the driver support issues from DRG with driver certification programs and Pre-XMAS Meltdown events during which hardware companies and game developers met at Microsoft to test the newest games on the newest hardware before the big Christmas PC and game buying season.  One of my Evangelists, Elizabeth Wiewall, formerly the DirectPlay Evangelist, had moved to join a product team to create what became Windows Update, originally developed for the purpose of keeping DirectX drivers current.  I stirred the flames of the OpenGL vs Direct3D battle publicly because that conflict made it difficult for the Talisman team to “slip” a proprietary architecture out without notice and public scrutiny.  They would have to work much harder to foist that platform off on an industry that had become highly sensitized to 3D standards.  In this respect even my “opponents” in the OpenGL group served my purposes well.

Here I am fanning the OpenGL vs D3D debate via John Carmack at Id Software a week before the Microsoft Multimedia Retreat.  Mike Abrash, formerly of the OpenGL team was now working for Id.

http://rmitz.org/stjohn.html

Anisotrophic filtering…
the only vestige of Talisman that survived into modern times

For his part Torborg was an affable nemesis.  He was a good company man trying to perform the job that senior Microsoft executives who had hired him, had appointed him with.  He hired “researchers” to produce reports that always justified the investment in Talisman.  Perhaps influenced by my successful argument that the diversity of competing graphics IHV’s supporting Direct3D was an asset to Microsoft, provided that Microsoft could manage the driver problems, Torborg shifted the Talisman strategy to license the technology to IHV’s instead of creating a proprietary Microsoft card.  If having their arms twisted to ship press releases endorsing Talisman annoyed the IHV’s, it was a better outcome for them than having Microsoft simply put them out of business as had been the original plan.  I even enjoyed working with my 3D idols who were very nice well-intentioned people.  They were just hopelessly removed from the real-world, had no business acumen and simply couldn’t understand the devastating consequences Microsoft’s grand schemes could have on thousands of small application developers who relied on Microsoft to provide a stable consistent platform for their software businesses.  It didn’t matter if I liked them; I still had to stop them.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/28/05/1997/3890/Microsoft39s-Talisman-goes-3D-with-Trident.htm

I began bringing game industry luminaries into Microsoft and showing their work to Bill Gates… to assist in contrasting the state of the ATG groups’ 3D research efforts versus what every-day game developers were creating using DirectX.  Gates was particularly impressed when I introduced him to Seamus Blackley.

In response to all of this conflict and turmoil, Nathan Mhyrvold contacted me and proposed hosting a Microsoft Multimedia Strategy day… and asked me to plan it.  Recall that ATG was Nathan’s baby, and I was busy making his people look like fools… For the record it’s pretty difficult to play a bastard when everybody cooperates… why?  I can only speculate;  Nathan and my boss, Cameron were brothers, I was the final and apparently very successful product of Microsoft’s strange Evangelism training program, a platform strategist who’s machinations had encompassed and shaped the entire company in a way that Gates and Nathan had tried and failed at by many other means.  DirectX was not the first but the second time I’d done it.  On my first months on the job Cameron had challenged me to find a way to influence Microsoft’s development organization to build better products without authority… clearly I had found a formula that accomplished what had been asked of me.  Somewhere within the highest ranks of Microsoft was a desire to find a way to make the company more responsive to real-world demands in a way that was strategically applied in the company’s interest.

In that era Microsoft was not afraid of conflict or competition within the organization.  It didn’t matter what your tone of voice was or how you made your case as long as it was factual.  The greatest sin at Microsoft back then was not being able to make your case supported by facts.  People, who got offended easily, lost their temper or were otherwise emotionally fragile where quickly marginalized.  I had learned that lesson quickly and like Michael Winser the evangelist who had trained me, I made sure I knew my stuff before I went into battle and I simply didn’t care what anybody thought of me.  I was always prepared to be fired for crossing the line… it was what “they” seemed to want of me…

This then was the setting for the final showdown.  A Microsoft Multimedia Retreat called for by Nathan Mhyrvold and organized by me scheduled for February 18^th, 1997 just four months before I was fired.  Bill Gates would participate for the entire day.  On one side of the room would be Nathans organization, the Talisman people the OpenGL team and the graphics luminaries from ATG, on the other side would be my selection of speakers from the game industry, each presenting their work and views on Microsoft’s multimedia strategy to Bill Gates.  Among those in attendance from the Industry was Seamus Blackley, Kevin Bachus, (Who was my successor and later created the DirectXBox project at Microsoft) Tim Sweeney founder of Unreal and many others.  All I really wanted at that point was a long vacation and to feel that I would not be responsible for f**king thousands of small developers by persuading them to adopt Windows as a platform only to have Microsoft use them to foist another terribly conceived consumer strategy off on the market.  It was a battle that I was personally destined to lose, yet won in spirit, despite all of my highly calculated machinations, accidentally…

Bill Gates + Seamus Blackley posing with the first DirectXBox 5 years after the Microsoft Multimedia Retreat. Seamus was “The Key Guy” that Nathan refers to in the following email

_____________________________________________
From: Nathan Myhrvold
Sent: Friday, February 07, 1997 3:14 PM
To: Bill Gates; Ed Fries; Jay Torborg
Cc: Alex St. John; Aaron Contorer; Pete Higgins; Jim Kajiya; Gregory Faust
Subject: RE: Dreamworks technical approach

We are trying to get their key guy to come up and talk at the multimedia retreat on 2/18.

Nathan

—–Original Message—–

From:             Bill Gates

Sent:               Friday, February 07, 1997 3:08 PM

To:                  Ed Fries; Jay Torborg

Cc:                  Alex St. John; Aaron Contorer; Pete Higgins; Jim Kajiya; Nathan Myhrvold

Subject:          Dreamworks technical approach

I was AMAZED at the technical sophistication of the DreamWorks Interactive team. The way they are doing physical modeling including the acoustics and physics is very state of the art. Their rendering algorithms draw on Talisman ideas.

Somehow I think Microsoft should draw on this technology in 2 ways:

a)   We should get our games group up to this level of sophistication by making sure we get to use the code and getting people who have this kind of ability.

b)   We should make sure our platform work and graphics plans are able to match what they are having to do for themselves. They admitted that other will clone their work so I don’t think they would mind the system taking over some of it.

The mail I got was about us discussing their use of Direct3D. This is fine but what I want is for our people to understand their whole approach and learn from it as well as making sure they like our DirectX plans.

It was very interesting that he said that having the AGP port with Klamath (including MMX) is better than any of the 3D cards that are out there. Also it was interesting how he had taken Talisman and was using some of the good ideas from it in his software.

I hope our seperation between ActiveMovie and DirectX isn’t going to prevent us from doing good work. It seems like these games guys are so far ahead of what we are doing right now that our work is not very leveraged. Our strategy is to take our work and put it in a Sega game and have this change the video game world. However unless DWI thinks what we are doing is fantastic and build on top of it then it’s a false dream.

I think we need to get their technical leader backup in the next few months to make sure we take full advantage of his expertise which I found very impressive.

_____________________________________________

Here is an old email that does an interesting job of illustrating Bill Gates state of mind three months after the Microsoft Multimedia Retreat

_____________________________________________

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 1997 5:35 PM
To: Jay Torborg
Cc: Deborah Black; Moshe Dunie; Jim Allchin (Exchange); Paul Maritz; Jim Veres; Nathan Myhrvold; Aaron Contorer; Mike Abrash; Carl Stork (Exchange); Ed Fries; Robert (Robbie) Bach; Alex St. John; John Ludwig; Tod Nielsen; Craig Mundie; Moshe Lichtman; Jim Kajiya; Alvy Ray Smith
Subject: DirectX and Talisman Update

I read most of the notebook that Jim put together for me entitled “DirectX and Talisman Update”. I encourage anyone of the cc line who is interesting in this topic to get a copy of the notebook.

I found section 8 from Inquest talking about who would use Talisman and why particularly helpful.

I understand Talisman better today than before. I still believe it is a very important technology.

However there is more uncertainty about Talisman’s role than ever before because of Intel and the diverse competitive set of companies doing PC graphics solutions. Intel and Microsoft both feel its important to advance PC graphics. Intel wants to use up CPU MIPS and get credit for its contribution publicly. Microsoft wants to get an advantage for Windows. Microsoft has a very strong position in graphics. We have invested a lot and if we can give developers a reliable set of drivers that let them use advanced hardware including whatever Intel gets behind they will follow our lead. I hope Intel appreciates the strength of our position – they can win the chip battle without us but not the software API battle even if they throw some money around.

It now seems there is a high probability that SGI will introduce an Intel based workstation and make that their volume offering. This is very important for Microsoft because they will endorse NT and Softimage will be a hardware platform that is well suited for high end digital video. We would be glad to let SGI have any extensions we make in our graphics API back on their workstations but we don’t want to give them away to Nintendo. SGI could be an ally of ours or an enemy in graphics APIs. Intel is talking to them about OpenGL extensions.

Some questions:

1. Under what terms have people licensed the technology? I am sure they are interested in getting patent coverage from us. Do we get any royalties or a restriction to Windows when they do a license? Are their Talisman products just an offshoot for people like ATI, S3, Trident and Matrox? If a license is an easy thing for them to do then it doesn’t really imply much for Talisman. Do rendition and 3Dfx have a high market share? We may have to work with the OEMs to get them to pick the right graphics hardware. Do we expect any arcade people to go with Talisman based hardware or does Intel/Lockheed Martin have that locked up?
2. When we talk about getting developers to do Talisman applications how are they supposed to deal with the partial implementations – is the software model for them identical?
3. How much work it is for tools like Softimage or the work the DWI did to generate data tables interpreted by code that take FULL advantage of Talisman? Is the key to get people to hand craft things or do the high level tools have to play a role? The evangelism proposal in the book says nothing about the importance of a breakthrough in working with tools people. However most of the award winning games recently have used very high level tools particularly Softimage.
4. What kind of work is going on with Java in this area? I saw they endorsed a particular audio approach. The Java platform is the greatest threat to us so I want to make sure they don’t benefit from any of our work and that we stay way ahead of them. We will NOT be doing OPEN JAVA animation or graphics work despite what the cross platform promoters want us to do.
5. Whatever happened to audio? I am unclear on what our strategy is in this area and whether these Talisman implementations include any of that. I haven’t heard anything about working with tools people. As I mention above Java seems to have a clear direction for audio whereas we seem to still be viewed as inferior to Apple and Progressive.
6. If someone wants to really take advantage of Talisman is there a higher level software layer from us they are likely to use? It seems like some people will not use a higher level layer. People like Seamus like to do their own work because the high level stuff has been bad. Since people won’t use our layer then its hard to have IP protection for anything other than the hardware techniques themselves I think.
7. When will there be a running full speed Talisman system to amaze people? I really doubt we will get more than a few games done before then.
8. We have put a lot of resources into Talisman. Its unclear to me how much resource we should have on an ongoing basis. Unlike previous years this is not discussed in the write up.

The critical action items seem to be:

1. Make sure we are making the right choice by starting with the OGL code. We need to listen carefully to what Alex and the game developers are saying to make sure we can succeed with this approach. Its very disappointing to me to have to start with the OGL code since its based on a standard we do not control but I do understand why this is the recommended choice and that we can move it in that direction. We will not let the cross-platform advocates commoditize our graphics APIs. We must have unique patented graphics APIs even though SUN will have equivalents and ours will not be cross platform.
2. We still need creativity about how we make sure video drivers are much higher quality using OEM and PSS. I think there is a structural problem here that we never seem to get on top of.
3. We need to get a commitment from EBU to do Talisman games – however they need a commitment from a Talisman hardware vendor or CPU vendor to do bundling and promotion.
4. We need to decide who besides EBU we should get to do early Talisman games. Again we have to work with Fujitsu, Trident and perhaps Matrox, S3 and ATI on this.
5. We need to decide how much of a budget we have for 3^rd party Talisman games and for DirectX promotion. Something like $2M to $3M is being requested I think.
6. Figure out our relationship to Intel in graphics. (also SGI)

Comments

comments